THE ART OF STYLE 285 



speculative questions which have been already discussed in a 

 former essay. 1 



For the present, it is enough to point out that a writer, 

 having developed his command of language, improved his 

 taste by reading, and discovered the compass of his organ of 

 expression, seeks further instruction when he wishes to apply 

 his power of style to any special form of prose or poetry. If 

 he is ambitious to compose an epic, he will inquire how 

 Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Milton, set about their task ; 

 or the taste of his age may direct him to the Scandinavian 

 Sagas, the Nibelungen, the Song of Roland, and the ' Morte 

 d' Arthur.' If he is an orator, he will consult Demosthenes, 

 Cicero, Burke, Bossuet. If his bent be toward tragedy, he 

 will meditate the Attic and Elizabethan dramatists, the French 

 classics, Goethe and Schiller. If he attempts satire, he will 

 see what Archilochus and Aristophanes, Juvenal and Persius, 

 Rabelais and Regnier, Cervantes and Swift, Dryden and Pope, 

 Heine and Victor Hugo, have done before him. If history 

 attract his genius, Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and 

 Tacitus, Machiavelli and Michelet, Gibbon and Macaulay, 

 Von Ranke and Mommsen, claim his attention. And so 

 forth through the whole long list of literary species. 



We cannot, in the present conditions of culture, affirm 

 that any monuments of art are absolutely authoritative. The 

 choice is large. The canons of criticism are liberal. The 

 instincts of the individual, whether at variance with the 

 general tendency of his age, or submissive to its influence, 

 will determine his selection of a model. Still, it is certain 

 that some model, whether deliberately chosen or passively 

 assimilated, exercises a control over the writer's manner. If 

 the art of style could be reduced to a fixed science, then 

 certain masterpieces in each branch of literature would have 

 to be recognised as indisputable standards, and production 

 would cease or merge in imitation. But the intellectual bias 

 of the century forbids such a relapse into the pedantry of 

 classicism. Taste, therefore, and the rules of comparative 



1 See above, Essay No. 2, on the Application of Evolutionary Prin- 

 ciples to Art and Literature. 



